Idle Power: the Riot, the Commune, and Capitalist Time in Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day

This chapter argues that Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) not only represents the temporality of capitalism but also contests it through an aesthetic strategy of idleness or sloth. It analyzes how Pynchon recuperates nineteenth-century traditions of anarchism, work refusal, rioting, and the commune as a way of responding to contemporary conditions of labor under capitalism. Putting Pynchon into conversation with the Italian Autonomist Marxists—most notably, Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti—it shows how Against the Day frames class struggle as a conflict between capitalism and workers regarding the social organization of time. It explains that Pynchon links the utopian reinvention of the United States to a political version of idleness, or a willful refusal of capitalist efficiency. It also situates Pynchon’s utopian imagination in respect to the social forms of the riot and the commune.

Dynamics of No-Load Losses in Power Transformers

Developed and released recommendations to clarify the calculation of idle power losses in power transformers of distribution networks. It takes into account the dynamics of magnetic properties changes in transformer cores, depending on the operation term and conditions, and major overhaul of the transformers with the magnetic core unburdening. It will improve the accuracy of normative losses calculation in power transformers and determine the most accurate structure of losses in electric networks.